Via these guys (and Reader JC):
“The only honest instruction left for voters is brutal and simple: treat most polls as arguments, not measurements.”
As always, the best “polls” take place at the actual polling booths (absent Socialist trickery and lawlessness).
Roll on, November.
Polls can say whatever you want them to say.
A long time ago, Penn and Teller had a show called BULLSHIT.
In on episode, they got a whole bunch of people to sign a paper to BAN WATER.
The average Joe, Dick and Sally is FUCKING STUPID.
The news and powers that be DEPEND on that stupidity.
That sums it up very well.
The fact is the party in power nearly always gets its ass kicked during the midterms. The only exception I can recall from recent memory is W after 9/11.
The best the Stupid party can expect is to hold serve. I see diesel is well over $6/gallon, which will jack up the price of everything else. Not looking good. If the Evil party takes both chambers, Trump will spend the remainder of his term fending off impeachment.
At least half of the “polls” are pure fabrication done by various campaigns, special interests and lobbyists. Even the ones that actually did real Polling are skewed by how they are filtered. Look for words like registered voters and likely voters etc, then they are also filtered by who even answers the phone or stops to talk to the street pollster. All the polls leading u to an actual election are bullshit. The pollsters will start getting more acuate close to the election in order the save thier own credability for the next cycle but who remembers which ones were so very wrong last time.
Every single time I’ve been asked to participate in a poll, my answer is “no”, “hell no”, “fuck off”, or something along those same lines. I imagine most people who’d agree with me politically do the same. Thus I never believe any poll because those of us who’d rather shoot politicians than vote for them tend to avoid polls.
In this last century the whole concept of polling, whether to learn public sentiment or to assign government officials, has become so corrupt as to be useless. The only real requirement for election these days is to have a burning desire to be elected.
The time has come to amend the constitution, replacing public choice of office holders with a combination of draft lottery and the Course of Honors, restricting public opinion to demand for recall. Let teens (who have not been assigned to terms of military service) begin at the municipal or county level paving roads, serving on the Selectboard or on the school district committee, and if they haven’t done so shockingly bad as to be recalled, they can be put into the pool for selection (by lot) as County Commissioner or State legislator. And onward and upward until they’ve served whatever term is in force, at which time they can re-enlist or rejoin the rejectees to pursue their own private careers.
Buh-but, you say, they haven’t been trained, they don’t have a degree, they might be ugly, they…..
Precisely.
.
You’ve been reading your Classical Greek History again, haven’t you?
Asimov, Phillip K Dick, and Heinlein.
From what I read about how the Doge in medieval Venice was selected, it might work there, too.
As Rush Limbaugh would say before each election cycle, until the final weeks before election day, the goal of mass-market pollsters is not to provide an accurate reflection of public opinion, it is to shape public opinion.
Once it gets closer to election day though, the pollsters are then in reputation protection mode so the results actually begin to more closely reflect the public’s position.
This is one of those things I don’t know about anymore.
We all thought the poll’s were wrong regarding Obama’s popularity. That turned out to inexplicably be more hope than fact.
I’m old enough to remember when these kind of things were regarded as indicative of trends, thoughts, and attitudes.
But I’ve also come to not trust any of it. I regard the formula’s they use as “scientific-ish” but I don’t trust the people generating them anymore. Because I don’t think its an attempt to discover, but an attempt now to steer, maybe it always was.
DJT & the internet, whether Good/Bad/Indifferent exposed what a lot of us suspected over the years but could never prove. That it didn’t fecking matter who we voted for, that the system was built and in place to benefit the purveyors, charlatans, & rent-seekers associated with the system. Polling was part of the system. When the system is threatened it reacts wholeheartedly against the threat.
DJT hasn’t done much qualitatively different, than any other President in my lifetime, he got us into wars he promised he wouldn’t, attempted to bribe the electorate, the regulatory agencies still exist, I still have to pay fucking income tax.
What he did do was be a threat to the system. As such he’s hated by the same, and they are trying like hell to destroy him for it. We as his (sometimes half-hearted) supporters represent the same threat. But now we can coalesce on the internet, and don’t have to meet in some Holiday Inn conference room and pass out poorly Xeroxed literature.
Power never surrenders power willingly. We should just all expect this from now on. Don’t trust anything anymore, and don’t surrender your own judgement to anyone else. That should be something we all have lived by.
I have never believed polls. Any of them. If you’re willing to spend the money, you’ll have no problem finding someone who will take it and give you a poll that says pigs can fly, or any other foolishness you want them to “measure”. I forget the details, but didn’t we just witness pollsters who were reporting “facts” they were pulling right out of their butts?
The only “polls” that matter are the ones on each Election Day, and more and more, even those are suspect. We are seeing Illegals being accused of voting when they shouldn’t even be qualified to sweep up afterwards. and there are still many unanswered questions about just who is counting the ballots or discovering “missing” ballots weeks after the elections.